1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to information exchange in a network environment. More particularly, it relates to a secure information exchange mechanism, system and architecture where a personal “lockbox” allows n suppliers of information to submit desired information that can be accessed in m different ways.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the growth of information sources, networks, and devices for accessing information, individuals like us find it increasingly difficult to receive only the information we want. Many computer programs and systems make it easy for producers of information to cause that information to reach individuals regardless whether the information is desirable. For example, marketers create and send unwanted electronic mails to virtually any email accounts they can get their hands on. This type of unwanted emails is called “spam.” As we adopt additional information appliances, or so-called Internet appliances, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistance (PDA) devices, and wireless network devices we will be accessing information sources, such as email, in more places and more often. Concurrently, as more companies and marketers bring their information to the marketplace, they will be generating additional content, some of which will be unwanted. Without some capability for an individual to strictly control or filter out unwanted information per that individual's needs and wants, the information economy will be severely impacted.
Currently, there are many commercial products that provide, to a certain degree, individualized or personalized access to information on the World Wide Web. Typically, a computer user may customize a “home page” that may include some categories of information in which the user has expressed interest as well as some information mandated by the supplier of the web page. The customization of each user's home page is limited to what is selectively provided by the supplier's server. For example, web portals such as Yahoo! allow users to customize their individual home pages with templates selected from a much larger amount of available stored information. The user typically views and accesses his or her home page through a web browser. The data for each home page may be stored locally on the user's computer for later retrieval if the user explicitly executes a save command. Using today's technology and with many tedious manual operations, a computer-savvy user could create a variety of personalized pages, follow the embedded URLs thereof to access more detailed content referred to by the embedded URLs, create a number of distinct subdirectories, select and store all pertinent information from a type of provider and of a particular category in a distinct subdirectory on the user's own computer system. In other words, it is possible to manually creating a repository of all and only the desired information, stored in appropriate compartments. However, such manual operation is undesirably time consuming and requires computer knowledge beyond ordinary. Moreover, until all relevant information had been accessed, filtered, separated, and stored on the user's computer, the user would be relying on the remote storage of information and several intermediary services provided by the web host and the web page-composer.